Monday Miscellany: Tuesday edition: mistakes, machines, mortality

October 28, 2008

-Flyer vs. flier: I have this debate with people all the time, and because I’m a very annoying person, I would like to publicly, officially, once-and-for-all state that it is “flier.”

Phew. You have no idea how good it feels to get that off my chest. Also: “Barnes & Noble” is not “Barnes and Nobles”!!! And!! Put your dang periods inside your quotation marks, please! And for the love of god, don’t even get me started on “luscious“!

Speaking of fli/yers:

-Mac users: Time Machine! Have you plumbed its depths yet? What a magical program! Two nights ago at an hour very similar to this one (3 AM) I inexplicably and amazingly erased the Green Party website whilst trying to update it. Time Machine had my back! I opened it up (very slow, because my computer is set to automatically back up to a server in the basement over our house network, another piece of computer magic that periodically blows my mind) and went to the day before I had erased the site, pressed “restore,” and all was fixed!

It almost makes up for the fact that my iphone decided to erase half my contacts the other day for no discernable reason.

Here’s my thing with machines: everyone always laughs when I tell them this theory, but it helps this neo-luddite make her peace with technology, so who cares who laughs?: Computery people will always tell you that computers (and machines in general) do things for a reason, and if you can’t figure out why they are doing something you don’t like it’s because you just aren’t smart or knowledgeable enough. I say that computers have minds of their own, and the sooner you realize this the less frustration you will feel when they inevitably begin to act irrationally. Give up trying to understand your computer’s ways and means, and peace will prevail.

Doesn’t it seem that computer-related frustrations have to be a big part of our so-easily incensed culture? I have a theory (another one, which sort of contradicts the previous one) that there is a special, extra-virulent strain of anger that one sometimes feels as a result of computerizing that, for example, pen and paper could never produce. In my life I have decided that the benefits of technology outweigh these frustrations (for now at least—tomorrow I could disappear into the woods forever, who knows), but it does seem that the wildly intense irritation technology sometimes engenders in me could only be caused by the non-natural, non-human world. Do you feel me?

.

-Sorry to change topics so quickly, but this is making me so sick I have to point it out:

Via Democracy Now!:
“An eight-year-old boy has died in Massachusetts after accidentally shooting himself to death at a gun show. The boy, Christopher Bizilj, was firing a 9mm Micro UZI automatic machine gun when he lost control and shot himself in the head. The boy’s father had given him permission to fire the UZI, which can fire hundreds of rounds in a minute. Advertisements for the gun show boasted: “No age limit or licenses required to shoot machine guns, handguns, rifles or shotguns!!!””